On March 16-17, the St. Urho/St. Patrick feast-day diphthong, we’re ALL Finno-Irish Americans!
Bless me father, for I have sinned against Wetmachine, having not posted here in about ten years. But because I’m nuts and a sentimental guy, I’ve been toying, lately, of getting the Wetmachine band back together & taking it on the road.
These days I mostly post on my substack Sundman figures it out!, but during the nearly 15 years that Wetmachine was my main online home, I often marked the St Urhu-Day/St Patrick’s Day dual fest. So I’m doing so again today, like a bear waking from a ten year nap.
I’m not going to bother to format this post. If you’d like the full experience with the pictures and working links, check out this version on SFIO!
If you do, I’d love it if you leave a comment to tell me that you got there from via this Wetmachine post.
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Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 73 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on the island of Noepe, also known as Martha’s Vineyard, that dead-ends into a nature preserve.
Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals. If you like this essay I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.
Together the heroes call us to our great heritage
Before Wetmachine, a group blog which I founded but which became better known to the world as ‘Harold (Feld)’s site,’1 (similar to how the J. Geils Band became known not as the band of J Geils, but as Peter Wolf (AKA ‘the wooba-gooba wit da green teef’)’s band), went into deep hibernation a la 2001, A Space Odyssey, every year (except on those years in which I forgot to do so) I made a post calling attention to the conjoined feast days of St. Urhu, patron saint of Finnish Americans on March 16th, and St. Patrick, patron saint of Irish Americans on the 17th.
I’m racing to get this note posted before the door closes on March 16, 2026, so happy Saint Urho’s Day to all who celebrate. And a pre-happy St. Patrick’s day to the much larger cohort of Irish Americans who’ll be wearin o’ the green tomorrow.
And an extra-special shout-out to Finno-Irish Americans like myself, to whom this dual holiday is doubly-sacred. Suomi go Bragh!
And now, to save me the trouble of writing something new, here’s a twice or thrice recycled Wetmachine Urhu-Patrick piece from days gone by2:
That great annual harbinger of spring, that mid-Lent quasi-Catholic dual name-day celebration for two saints (at least one of whom probably (or at least possibly) existed), that diphthong of drinking excuses, the elision of St. Urho’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day, is again upon us. This, more than even the setting of the clocks ahead, gives us to know that we have survived another winter.
Now, it’s well known that Irish Americans can be very loud and unsubtle about celebrating their (our) heritage of leprechauns and bullshit artists and crooked politicians from South Boston and great singers like Ella Fitzgerald.
Ella Fitzgerald – The Best Woman That Sang Jazz Music | uDiscover Music
The legendary colleen Ella
And so of course everybody in America and around the world knows that tomorrow is Evacuation Day, I mean St. Patrick’s day, in honor of the great Romano-British Christian missionary who returned to the land of his captivity and bondage as an apostle of peace and went on to drive the serpents into the sea, (or maybe not), and so Guinness will be consumed, and cabbage, and yea, Harp Lager too, begorrah.
Alas throughout much of this country that is not the upper Midwest, the name day of St. Urhu, who drove the grasshoppers from Finland (today, March 16) is sadly neglected, to the point that we can expect virtually no mention of it by color commentators in television broadcasts of today’s pre-season baseball games.
My mother always said that sharing Sundman figures it out!! was much more satisfying than drinking a pint of some murky, sweet Irish stout with a plate of corned beef & cabbage.
But let it never be said that Wetmachine has forgotten the confabulated patron saint of the Finno-American diaspora (of which I am a proud member), the great St. Urhu, whose famous utterance Hein sirkka, hein sirkka, mene tlt hiiteen (grasshopper, grasshopper, buzz off why dontcha?) still stirs our hearts everywhere.
Statue of St. Urho in Minnesota
That saintly collusus!
It’s OK to mark this day without alcohol, but consumption of traditional all-starch foodstuffs is encouraged. So if you can find some Karjalanpiirakka, go for it.
Confession: I’m not pure Finno-Irish
Actually it was my father, John E. Sundman, who was Finno-Irish. His father, Reinhold, AKA ‘Pop,’ rechristened ‘John’ at Ellis Island, whose heroic resistance to piggish Russian occupiers led to his dramatic flight to America, ~1914, where he met and married the bewitching Irish maiden from County Roscommon, Lillian Hudson, herself a recent immigrant to these shores, (when poor immigrants were welcome and celebrated here, as they should be, always, before the Republican Nazis (ptui, I spit) took over the Federal government and began their Nazi campaigns against our fellow immigrants of today —but fuck them (the Nazi-Americans), their days are numbered, may they rot in Hell, Amen) I chronicled in this SFIO! essay, one of my most popular essays ever:
A lone figure skis across a frozen sea, pursued by Russians shooting guns
john sundman
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July 4, 2023
A lone figure skis across a frozen sea, pursued by Russians shooting guns
How my grandfather, a teenage Finnish resistance fighter against Russian occupation, fled his home & family, on skis, alone, and came, penniless, to America.
So while my father was Finno-Irish, I’m only half so, inasmuch as my mother, “Mom,” AKA Margaret Mary McFall Sundman, was an immigrant from Scotland.
But please note: my mother was a Catholic immigrant from Scotland. Which is pretty close to Irish Catholic, if you think about it. (Also my mother was a passionate anti-Nazi who spent the Clydebank Blitz in a backyard Andersen bomb shelter. . . I could digress but I think I won’t for once. . .)
Resuming. . .
But let’s not go down unpleasant paths; there will be plenty of time for that soon enough. Let us rather do the least we can do to uphold our most sacred Wetmachine traditions, [of which Sundman figures it out! is the inheritor], one of which being the observation of the annual elision of the name days of Saints Urhu and Patrick, a happy pairing that brings pride and joy to all of us Finno-Irish Americans — including you, dear SFIO! reader, if you choose to so identify. Whatever your heritage, dear reader, welcome. And take courage, because for the duration today and tomorrow, at least, we are all Finno-Irish!
1
I have a story about that, involving the then-chairman of the FCC Kevin Martin, who told me, when I mentioned my site Wetmachine, and I quote, “Wetmachine? Oh, you mean Harold’s site.’ But that’s not a story for today.
2
I copy-pasted this from 2016. How time doth fly when you’re in suspended animation in a spaceship flying to Jupiter. I’ve made only minor edits.
